When a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook southern Turkey and northern Syria on 6 February, Murat Naomi rushed out of his home in his running gear. His mother, who normally covers her hair with a hijab, fled their first-floor apartment without one, fearing the building could collapse .
Mother and son went to a large central square in Kilis , a southern Turkish town that hugs the Syrian border and the nearby Bab al-Salam crossing into the north-west of a country they once called home. Over the border is Jisrash-Shugur, where Naomi’s father, sister and fiancee still live.
The pair huddled in the town square for two days, hoping for salvation. Two minarets in the centre of the little town were badly damaged and 178 buildings around the town collapsed, killing 73 people and injuring almost 700 more. “We couldn’t read the funeral rites because so many people died,” he said.
Surrounded by verdant fields of olive groves and farmland, Kilis nevertheless appeared to form a remarkable pocket of normality in the centre of a zone of physical devastation that touched every large city around it, particularly the Turkish trade hub of Gaziantep an hour’s drive north and the historical Syrian city of Aleppo just over an hour to the south.
As the town reeled from the destruction around it, many of its Syrian residents such as Naomi wondered about their futures amid declarations by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to return 4.4 million Syrians to their war-scarred country.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 03, 2023 من The Guardian Weekly.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة March 03, 2023 من The Guardian Weekly.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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A labour of love Haruki Murakami revisits a hypnotic city of dreams and a tale of teen sweethearts, in material he's worked on over four decades
The elegiac quality of Haruki Murakami's new novel, his first in six years, was perhaps inevitable considering its origins. The City and Its Uncertain Walls began as an attempt to rework a 1980 story of the same title, originally published in the Japanese magazine Bungakukai, which Murakami, unsatisfied, never allowed to be republished or translated.
Leading questions The former German chancellor slights her enemies by barely mentioning them-and is frustratingly opaque on her own big calls
Towards the end of her 16-year tenure, former German chancellor Angela Merkel was garlanded with superlative titles: the \"queen of Europe\", the \"most powerful woman in the world\".
Double vision
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It's high time to tax cannabis and fix French finances
France might not be broke, but the state of its public finances is, well, definitely not good. Total debt stands at €3.2tn ($3.4tn) - 112% of GDP. Interest payments on that debt are the second largest public expenditure after education (which includes everything from crêche, or preschool, to universities) and are higher than the amount spent on defence. And this year's budget deficit is projected to be 6%, three points above the EU's 3% limit.
